Two Poems for Czesław Miłosz (1980)
1. Hills in the Livermore Valley
Swans of grass, sun-swollen apricots, pollen-hoard of almonds
and their bees, their horses grazing orchard rows,
odor of eucalyptus, blown roses, and resinous vineyard dust.
A kestrel hangs unmoving in the updraft
funneled through a saddle-dip
where the big cork oak keels upslope, revealing
the long-term plans of the wind to ripple
just here, at the pass.
Over the ridge the dam-filled lake, golden fields
stitched to the black water’s hem,
Umbrian, star-thistled,
verdure of the streams lined with calla lilies
and orange poppies, swifts eating midges below the cattle bridge.
Confronted with beauty in such abundance
the mind balks, like a young lover staggering at the threshold,
a scribe reluctant to acknowledge
the enormity of the account he must commit to paper,
while the body—spilled ink, overripe grapes, cabernet
decanted from an aromatic cask—
pools and fructifies, ages and breathes.
And we, being both, must mediate that conflict,
just as the kestrel, scanning toyon and manzanita for prey,
mediates between the sky and the tapestry of chaparral
unraveling into a wilderness of eastward distance,
born hungry, suspended between realms, looking for a sign.
2. A Castle Surrounded by Chestnut Trees
Turned from the sun, as if in grief,
half earth drinks the pauper’s milk of stars.
When morning comes the world that greets the sleepers
is no longer nature’s primordial realm
but a planet of old women scattering birdseed,
dark-eyed girls trying to look very grown-up after school,
naïve shrines adorned with pink dahlias,
apple trees crabbed with fruit amid vegetable plots
running down to the train tracks—a pheasant
in the stubble, red and green plumes
like the helmet of a cavalry officer seen in a vision—
the tracks that run to Auschwitz,
the bitter dust of Birkenau spiraling skyward
in billows, a winding sheet, a shroud.
Having made the earth our own, irrevocably,
the contest for its future becomes a human struggle,
moral, ethical, spiritual, rhetorical,
and those undamaged by the brute mechanisms of evil
must live life as a dispensation, a gift,
we, the unbent, the untortured,
must bear witness
to inhumanity wherever it takes root,
in the glyphs and stumble stones,
the keel strakes and roof tiles,
the leaf shudder, the rain-spatter,
among archival fragments, tesserae, lost teeth,
in the candle glow, the tallow reek,
at the last hush, listening
for the shovel-fall of earth upon a coffin lid.
Rain on the Vistula, grey as salt.
Wind in the riverbank rushes and silver willows,
hack of dust at the back of the throat,
burning there, clotting, like poison. The net tightens;
distant mountains bar their passes against me,
the past assembles a cage of falling leaves in air.
I will never escape the twentieth century.
Elegy for Eugenio Montale (1981)
Why should happiness infuse my days through this wick of ink I burn to write a poem?
Why should grace resemble a drooping lemon tree in its terra-cotta urn, not a city or a library or a beatitude or a ghost?
How does love endure in a universe of unlegislated molecules, the stars like silver bearings on which titanic machinery turns?
Yesterday, after gales of rain, the lemon tree glowed as if in rapture,
while all around the garden tiny newborn snails held fast to the tips of the tallest grasses, waiting for the puddles to recede.
To Héctor Viel Temperley (1982)
I rise straight from the ocean and I am in ecstasy
though I aspire to arrive like a wave
eternally
in progression,
ascent and diminution
as radio transmissions bound for the stars.
My neighbor is a broken man washing his car
again and again in morning sun,
what good is faith without shadow, moonlight
on the dunes,
clouds like ancient murals?
I aspire to rise.
I aspire to rise and fall.
• • •
I rise straight from the ocean and I am in ecstasy
digging sand from a dune until my palms bleed,
until the hammer plants
the heel of the hand
with its harsh, romantic kiss.
Because the life of the body bewilders me
no longer, recalling the sweetness
of dates
and rose-apricot jelly,
bitterness
of a radish
scraped against the teeth,
certain the world matters—and yet:
if we had wings would we suffer,
if we had gills?
Children riding imaginary sea horses,
rays and sharks, an ocean of satiation—
my voice does not contain such silk,
listening to the tide’s condolence
I hear always the countermelody
at each arrival,
each farewell.
Inexhaustible, the suitcases we will need
to pack away the sorrows yet to come.
• • •
I rise straight from the ocean and I am in ecstasy,
proposing faith in a sentence
marching across the page,
simple sentences marching
across the wilderness of the page,
one,
and then—
another.
Beautiful sentences, beautiful sentences!
To which, like cities
in the path of the great Khan’s army,
we throw open our gates
lest the obliteration of Urgench
be our portion.
• • •
I rise straight from the ocean and I am in ecstasy,
entirely at peace watching a dog cross the drawbridge
like an ambassador from another planet,
sailboats festooned with signal flags, pennants
dripping salt and devotion.
To the poets of the future
I make but one request on your behalf:
don’t just sing it like you mean it.
Mean it.
Then sing it.
Grey is the color of blindness,
but also of sight:
white rocks and black rocks, the moon and her daughter,
equally grey. The door into the dark
is a door into the light,
neither can exist without
its opposite,
women and men, the living and the dead,
we belong to their marriage quarrel,
everything grey
in the cloud-forest of the mind.
Grey of milk in a shadowed pitcher,
grey of goslings, grey of rivets.
Grey being the color of eternity
I commend myself
to its embrace, grey potato skins
slopped for mud-grey hogs, the runted piglet
consumed by its kin,
old snow in the coal-ash arroyo,
almond-husk and violet gravel,
grey as affirmation,
grey as union, the doe at twilight,
the mesa by starlight,
cloud-marked dawn like a brindled flank.
Color of Third Avenue mornings
flush with fresh linen, roman numerals chiseled in basalt,
the Chrysler Building
an awl
to pierce the sheep’s caul
through which an airplane descends with bursts of illumination
befitting the immodesty of twentieth-century gods.
Grey as the void
of memory
in which I imagine the feel of a brush
but can’t recall its purpose,
cannot envision the cream of jimsonweed, slashed
throat of a dahlia—
what else did god intend me to paint
beyond the flowers
he saw fit to bequeath us,
rocks and flowers, bones
as a last resort.
Color of ghosts, color of clouds and Manhattan,
color of everything
Stieglitz ever photographed, my young body
unrecognizable as the city’s erotic stonework—
who is that woman
with hips like the weathered horns of an antelope?
Where has it run to,
in this desert,
the lavish water of her hair?
When I lie on my side my knees and ankles bang together,
bone touching bone through pliant, implausible layers of skin,
as if foretelling the intimacy they will soon enough regain,
or come to know, clattering with a sound peculiar to bones
tumbled in heaps, in wooden caskets, in shovelfuls of stony earth.
Pure projection, of course, to imagine one’s bones imagining
the fleshlessness that awaits them: bones are beams and tent poles,
the body cannot foresee the abyss, as Orwell saw the future,
or had it previewed for him, with peculiar clarity, in Barcelona,
fighting for the Republic during the Spanish Civil War,
when his Trotskyite worker’s militia found themselves between
the guns of the Fascists in the trenches and the guns
of their brothers-in-arms, the Communists, who had learned
that it was sometimes more useful to kill friends than enemies,
to strangle a brood-mate, too many hatchlings in the nest.
Useful, though, in what sense? Not to win the war, certainly,
not to bring about the Revolution; useful only in maintaining power.
Power as end and means. So the litany of spies, informers,
disinformation, imprisonment, abduction, torture and murder
compiled during that very minor ideological skirmish in 1936
would be enough to turn anyone bitter and vindictive,
let alone a deeply alienated, misogynistic man like Orwell,
who saw at once that Left or Right mattered not a farthing
to the mint of Totalitarianism coining its bright currency,
stamping the century with black boots and bloodred fists.
Curious that their most powerful weapon would be Orwell’s own,
language, propaganda, words uprooted from the soil of meaning,
words torn free of their moorings, boats scuttled in a storm.
Slavery is Freedom, War is Peace, Life is Death. Et al.
Of course Winston Smith was a fool not to see it coming,
blinded by utopian lust into complicity in his own downfall,
and Edward Snowden seems less Orwell than Winston Smith.
Of course Big Brother is watching—as he watched in Ur
and Nineveh, peering down from his thatch-shaded ziggurat
to spot rebels, usurpers, messiahs, bandits, rivals of any stripe.
What’s changed is the technology and apparatus of power
not the state’s desire to suppress, dominate and control.
Ruling elites perch like cattle egrets upon a herd
whose individuality they dissolve into triumphal narratives
of divine intent, or class solidarity, or racial purification.
Orwell, dry-eyed cynic, would never have credited this edition
of 1984, this future not of dystopian scarcity but profusion
to beggar his socialist dreams, the West triumphant,
cracks running everywhere through the spalling pedestals
of the Autocrats—a world in which a McDonald’s sign
on the Via Propaganda does not raise a single Roman eyebrow
in ironic commentary—papal cross replaced by Golden Arches
though the orthodoxy remains, the sales pitch, the paperwork.
Still, democracy is a young horse in an old race, let it savor
its garland of roses. Let Stalin’s empire perish unmourned.
Let sledges shatter the blocks of tyranny into fragments
from which new walls may be fashioned, stronger walls
for harsher masters. Let the people have their moment,
banners in hand, statues toppling, children held aloft,
their symbols of solidarity already taken up by the marketplace
in ads for Swiss watches and Japanese cars, their slogans
co-opted by the very power they have cast into the shadows
to lick its wounds and seek out better PR consultants.
The twenty-first century will dawn, hungover, reeking of liberation,
and what then? How to keep the Gulags from refilling?
And yet, what else to believe in, even Orwell wondered,
what besides these people and the words they chant—
liberty, justice, equality—whose very utterance, however fleeting,
however contested, denotes a faith in some common future
beyond the boot in the face forever. Peace, solidarity, freedom.
Just that. Against fear and oppression, against the tyrants,
against the ideologues, against the darkness, just that.
Words in the mouth of a truth-hungry man.
Somewhere, somehow, I strayed from the righteous path.
I lost my way, like melancholy Dante,
in the selva oscura of Hollywood. Too young
I slaked my thirst for glory at the well
of star dust, indolence, and wanton flesh.
Such bodies—Rita, Paola, Eartha, Oja—
their names a trill of verbal ecstasy
to help erase the taste of what I lost,
or gave away, or never shot, or shot
and lost to studio hacks like Harry Cohn,
or bowdlerized, or forged, or dreamed and forgot,
or never could forget—Chicago, Cannes,
traveling through Connaught by mule at sixteen;
Broadway at dawn after opening night;
voodoo, The Shadow, Dolores Del Rio;
the snowbound boardinghouse in Colorado
where Charlie Kane’s last, tortured glimpse of home
makes Agnes Moorehead’s gothic silhouette
a monument to childhood bereavement;
my mother’s voice, like a cello, as she died;
my father’s wastrel ghost invoked in my own
improvidence, my Falstaffian appetites.
What else does memory resemble but
the uncut rushes of a feature film,
slurry of outtakes, axed lines and overdubs
from which a master narrative emerges
frame by frame, sequence by recut sequence,
as my life’s quixotic script has been reshot
to skew from comedy to tragedy,
from tragedy back to cautionary farce.
The skill, my friends, is in the editing.
What to cut, what to print, what to transform
with flash pots and flimflam. Presto chango!
All art is conjury, deception, magic.
All the world’s an audience, and I’m onstage
alone, directing, playing every part,
all seven ages compassed in my girth,
old man at birth, proud youth, enfant terrible
unripening to infantile excess,
bathtubs full of ice cream and chorus girls,
small comforts, small indulgences, small lies
just brash enough to get her into bed.
My yarns were hardly worse than the Bard’s tall tales
of Rosebuds fixed in time by poetry.
But movies burn too brightly to survive
the gloom of posterity’s hive-dark archive.
They shine a brief moment, outdazzling the stars,
and then burn out, fade down, dissolve, go black.
Film dwarfs the power of atomic bombs.
Destruction is child’s play, death is a cinch,
what’s hard is to shine a light upon the heart,
to illuminate the souls of men and sear
them into incandescent celluloid,
not graveless bones, irradiated ash.
Boozy, waggish, wolfish and ham-handed,
I was what I was and I am what I am,
student, lover, soldier—a prodigy,
a leading man, a fool afraid of nothing now
but death, the IRS and Lady Macbeth.
What’s in a name? Best say: this was a man.
Orotund, ursine, hirsute, stentorian,
obese and obsessed, twice-blessed and thrice-cursed,
doomed but undimmed, the one and only Orson.
My five-year tour of duty in New York City
fell during that downtrodden era when it was dubbed,
not without ironic affection, New Calcutta,
tail end of a decades-long cycle of civic and social change
that left a dank, uneasy detritus at the turn of the tide.
Homeless men wandered into the local diners
to drink bottles of watery ketchup off the lunch counter
before they could be hustled back out to Amsterdam Avenue.
The 103rd Street subway station resembled Beirut,
shattered tiles cascading from collapsing walls,
stairwells with handrails torn from their stanchions
to rust in puddles of urine, everything so far beyond broken
as to be worthless, scabbed with filth and graffiti,
and the lone transit worker in his bulletproof booth
peeking warily from beneath the brim of his uniform cap
like the citizens staring out through grated windows
as if to ask, what the hell happened? Ebb years,
which engendered an inevitable counterflood
towards law and order, primness and conformity,
just as the New Formalists proposed to stem
free verse’s laxest practices with their familiar praxis
of meter ruled with metronomic regularity,
tuck-pointing brownstones, renaming neighborhoods,
pushing the street people further into the outer boroughs
as the lucre that primed the pump began to gush anew.
New York is a school that can teach you anything,
three-card monte to leveraged buyouts,
Yiddish opera to extreme martial arts,
but what I learned is that what I was learning
was not a field of inquiry but a way of life, a calling,
devotion to a muse who for all her unforgivable beauty
was merely one daughter of the cloud-begirt kingdom of art.
Those were the last years of my grandmother’s life,
and I would sometimes ride the subway to 168th Street
to visit her claustrophobic apartment in Washington Heights,
where my parents had been children when upper Manhattan
was a shtetl of Viennese Jews fleeing the specter of Anschluss
and Broadway a boreen for thirsty Irish immigrants,
when the cure for a hot summer evening was to ride
the open-top Fifth Avenue bus from Van Cortlandt Park
to Washington Square with your ringleted sisters
harmonizing hit songs by Perry Como and Doris Day.
At her funeral there was more bitterness than sorrow,
and afterwards we were shanghaied on a nostalgic tour
of “the old neighborhood,” blocks of neglected tenements
become a teeming, salsa-toned Dominican barrio,
arguing over which building Ralphie Desoto had lived in,
where the parish boundary for St. Rose of Lima fell,
pausing before the most abject crackhouse to recall
the way a ham sandwich wrapped in wax paper
might be expertly tossed from a fourth-story window
if you forgot your lunch on the way to school.
Where did that world of stickball and Buffalo nickels go?
Where now is Ralphie Desoto, Perry Como, Peewee Reese?
Where are Hart Crane’s angelic sailors carousing these days?
Where have the New Formalists vanished to,
Whitman’s ferry-bound Bowery Boys, Carl Solomon’s ghost?
Where else but the past, a river much like the Hudson,
tidal, dynamic, cliff-bound, estuarine, its source
hidden in pine-covered mountains and its mouth disgorging
dioxins and milk crates and sea bass and lost souls
relentlessly into the cold salt flux of the Atlantic.
Andy Warhol: Waterfall of Dollar Signs (1987)
Joseph Brodsky in Venice (1988)
La Serenissima, in morning light, is beautiful.
But you already knew that.
Palette of honeyed ochre and ship’s bell bronze,
water precisely the color of the hand-ground pigment
with which the water of Venice has been painted for centuries,
angled slats of aquamarine chopped by wakes to agate,
matte black backlit with raw opal
and anodized aluminum, rope-work of wisteria, wands
of oleander emerging from hidden gardens. At noon,
near the boatyard of the last gondola maker, a violin echoes
from deep inside an empty cistern.
Lo and behold. Ecco.
A swirl of wind-blown ashes from yet another cigarette
and for a moment you see December snow
in Saint Petersburg, the Lion’s Bridge, crystalline halo
crowning Akhmatova’s defiant silhouette.
Sunset: bitter orange and almond milk,
sepia retinting the canals with cartographer’s ink
as you study the small grey lagoon crabs
patrolling a kingdom of marble slabs
descending into the depths; rising almost imperceptibly,
the tide licks at, kisses, then barely spills
across the top step’s foot-worn, weed-velveted lip
in slippery caravans, dust-laden rivulets.
So another day’s cargo of terrestrial grit
enriches their scuttled realm,
and they make haste, like drunken pirates in a silent film,
erratically but steadfastly, to claim it.
Men will come to build the wall,
men will come to tear it down,
with fists, with horns, with hammers.
Men will come to build the wall,
men will come to tear it down,
with words, with guns, with banners.
Men will come to build the wall,
men will come to tear it down,
with gold, with threats, with lawyers.
Drawn by history’s mirror,
with fists, with horns, with hammers,
mounted on dreams of glory,
with words, with guns, with banners,
armored in truth and virtue,
with gold, with threats, with lawyers,
men will come to build the wall,
men will come to tear it down,
men will come to build the wall,
men will come to tear it down.
Hubble Space Telescope: The Galaxies (1990)
Altar of red smoke in darkness, a life, a précis,
ants in their task-selves, bees in their hive-self dreaming of
the universal city, of Atlantis & its burnished vaults, spectral
bereavement of its ocean-dusk, Rome looted of marble, dark matter
& the dark metropolis of stars,
cities of the text in blossom as the orchid tree proffers its wounds to
the darkness, as the poinciana rails casual flame,
vernix scriptorium, vitruvian scroll of clouds & dreams,
honeybee asleep on the spine of a Ptolemaic cosmography, dung
beetle on the skull of an ibis, jawbone of an antelope splintered by
hyenas,
coral—their ruined groves, their blossoming colonization of rib &
ark, canopic jars, fractal runes around Rho Ophiuchi, exfoliant dust
in bas-relief,
hair of a nymph glossed with jewels as water in a vase of hyacinth, in
a vessel of sunflowers,
structure in the Vela supernova remnant—pillars of light within the
smoke of light within the blue atomic halo of light, its foundry, its
wheel, its vineyard, canted & bound,
its dicta, its quanta, its folly, its thrum,
ramparts, manacles, urns, jeroboams, shroud of hoarfrost upheld
in the blast, figuration in henna & sackcloth, the one who polishes
smooth stones, the one who casts stones into the sea,
centerward, corebound, yolk plume, obsidian spume, spire of the self
keeled & sprung like a bean sprout fledged & garlanded, the crab, the
pestle, egg tooth against a window of luminous agency,
pups, pupae, prayer shawls, the pelican, helicon, homonym,
phoneme, helix & whorl, the hunter & the hunted,
to transpire, to reflect, to mean, to signify, to detect, to obscure, to
reread,
ants in the spilled fermented milk & honey of it, the spoiled grain of it,
boundary marks, blazes, analogs, the owl in the hazelnut tree, the
soul—who calls from the rain of starlight, who answers?
Lee Atwater’s Apocalyptic Dream (1991)
Some nights I dream again of how it was when I was whole and hale, unhooked from this cancerous IV, untethered, unapologetic, when I was King of the 1980s, Iron Lee, World-Shaper Lee, whiteboy Lee with a gutbucket Telecaster buckled to my hip, because I’m real with the music, the blues belong to me because I desire their grace and humanity like a soul or the conscience I hear dripping all night but cannot still or tap, like the accents I slip into without noticing, talking jive with the brothers at the gas station, my beautiful soul brothers.
Even then I know the people will betray me, the President will not attend my funeral, as a master shies from the stench of the faithful dog lying dead at his feet.
I know because it is my providence to have gazed into the secret heart of the Republic and seen the lies and the truths intermingled there, my genius to have understood that lies are a kind of truth if they get you what you want.
That’s how the dream begins, with the wanting and the getting, the victory of stolen kisses in Times Square, already the miracle appliances whispering chromed proposals to the roost-ready gals and home-coming guys newly enlisted for the Great War of Material Consumption, boom-boom children now sprung and running loose across fulsome lawns and the finned cars evolving like prehistoric sharks backward up the ladder, Elvis emerging, the hillbilly hepcat, the GI, the rocker, the lounge act, the gold-suited Protestant apotheosis of the dream, there it was, pneumatic and buffered and fluted with rock and roll,
the world I would inherit, acquire, study, shape, a new world made literal in the atom-spray of democracy, the political fact of it amid the anticlimax of Cold War, which too would end in the uncertainty of victory, which way to turn, the disillusionment of hegemony, the anxiety of influence, sowing the soil of the conquered with Egg McMuffins and KFC, Elvis in the house of suede with his pills and vomit, sorrowing Elvis, in the end, no rhythm, only blues.
His death was a fraud, of course, a myth, a special op, top clearance, eyes only, though the clues were obvious, the charade of the misspelled tomb as empty as Christ’s—suffice it to say he slipped away, he was enabled to slip away, to escape the drugs and the boys and the underage girls—CIA, NSA, the details remain obscure, the agency unimportant.
He lived in a cabin in Montana for a decade, he lived in Nevada, a hermit in a hut of scrapwood amid the ancient bristlecones on desert peaks, exchanging secrets with Basque shepherds and Navajo shamans, absorbing their sere wisdom, wizened now, near-immortal himself, leathered and glorious and tried in the stony proving grounds like some Old Testament prophet returned to us, at that moment, for divine and exquisite purpose.
And so we dressed him in a power tie and put him on the stump and the numbers were insane, the polls unanimous, he was universally electable, any state in the union, red and white and blue, two uneventful years in the Senate and he was ripe for the top, bigger than Kennedy, Reagan, Lazarus.
Sometimes at the rallies we worried the arena might collapse with the sheer immanent joy of his believers, a kind of love I have dreamed all my life of finding, dreamed of creating and refining to suit my purpose, and I made no mistakes, took no prisoners, he smiled and nodded his way to the White House and then he was beyond me.
Beyond the grasp of the agencies and cabals and interest groups and councils of power, beyond even the money that made slaves of us all.
He was pure and inviolable, emancipated, an embodiment of freedom and justice and of our lives and times and what we stood for, the chosen son resurrected and unleashed with power to rule the globe, to guide us or free us or save us—or what?
To push the button. To rain black fire from the sky. To command the waiting squadrons to rise from the plains of Nebraska, the Polaris submarines and hardened silos disgorging their missiles across the pole toward the vast Asiatic interior, vapor trail and mushroom cloud our emblem, and more, still more, ever more, not just north and east but west and south, not just the Chinese and the Russians but the French and the Pakistanis and the Brazilians and the Saudis, Turks and Czechs, Fijians, Khmer, Masai, friend and enemy alike consigned to the flames, engulfed in the finale of tracer lines across computer monitors,
and it was real, it was our destiny, chosen and inevitable, and I was not weeping or gnashing my teeth there, in the black bunker, in the darkness beneath Cheyenne Mountain, I was mad with delight, tears like slot cars racing down my cheeks, not wishing it but nonetheless expecting it and believing in it, joyful and complete when Elvis begins to sing, in his white robes and long beard, in the cavern of Strategic Air Command, not kitschy, not sad or happy or good or bad but simple and just and true,
mine eyes have seen the glory, as the world explodes in the fire of our righteousness, he has trampled out the vineyards,
and I’m with him now, rising into a funnel of white light, rising from the pale and damaged body, giddy with the simple changes and progressions, humping out those blues chords like reverential moonbeams bounced off or ingested, rising from the hospital bed with the smile of a child, playing my guitar, free at last.
Nothing is ticking, the clocks are cheap electronic displays
flashing disarticulated red numerals in the darkness.
The Worldwide Web is an egg-slick hatchling, a wobbly-legged colt;
hyperlink is not part of the jargon, spam is still canned meat.
Reality television is not yet a buzzword, the joys and sorrows
of the Kardashians remain entirely their own.
Everything is digital but the future will be virtual, the future
will be live-streamed, crowd-sourced, fully interactive.
Bill Clinton becomes president. The Cold War peters out.
The European Union is founded, to polite applause.
Rigoberta Menchú wins the Nobel Peace Prize,
the AIDS quilt is unveiled, McDonald’s opens in Beijing.
A Polish astronomer discovers the first extrasolar planets
orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12, in Virgo.
The borough of Centralia, Pennsylvania, is condemned
and seized by eminent domain; fires beneath the town will burn,
it is estimated, for another two hundred and fifty years.
The century is long in the tooth, the century is closing up shop,
bringing down the curtain, heading for the exits—
Francis Bacon dies, John Cage and Lawrence Welk die.
Freddie Mercury has decamped, Miles Davis has laid down his horn.
Bruno Bettelheim, Jiang Qing, Martha Graham, Dr. Seuss,
Frank Capra, Ava Gardner and Curtis LeMay are gone.
On a beautiful spring day in Chicago, Sam McGrath is born
and history halts in its tracks—no, history remains blind
to the astonishing arrival of this red-haired infant
with the deeply wrinkled aspect of a wise and ancient ant,
but my own life, so profoundly engaged with the culture,
decouples, in that instant, from its onrushing locomotive.
Time alters. Or I do. We—I—let go of the guide rope,
drop the century’s ticker-tape lifeline and drift
into a still pool beyond the pull of historical circumstance.
Exhaustion and exultation—what else happened in 1992?
What were the hit songs, the movies? It’s all recoverable,
the data is in the cloud, we have entered the Information Age,
but can you turn back a clock that lacks the metaphor of hands?
What else has been lost with the watchmaker’s tools
if not the idea of time as continuum, time as a coiled spring?
Earth orbits the sun but what are hours? Do minutes exist
if we do not hear them tick? A century is a measuring stick,
a heuristic, but where is the glory in A Love Supreme
compared with an instant of bird-trilled infant babble?
Against a scraped knee what matters the tragedy of Verdun?
Century of infant teeth & artificial hearts, century
of triumphalism & colostrum. And what else, what else
happened that year we wove a swallow’s nest
of baby blankets and teething rings around ourselves?
One Sunday we took Sam to visit his great-grandmother,
Jane, in a room smelling of medicine and sugar cookies,
where, with Sam in her lap, she recalled with vivid
immediacy an event from her own childhood:
she was raised in towns across the north woods of Wisconsin,
her father a foreman following the lumberjacks from mill to mill,
and one night the forest caught fire, the mill town engulfed,
Jane’s family racing to escape in a horse-drawn wagon,
swaddled in wet rugs against a storm of sparks and embers.
It was as visceral to her as if it had happened yesterday,
the smell of the dank wool, pine trees bursting into flame—
you could see her descend within herself to that place,
that moment, and draw it forth like water from a well.
You could feel history crowding the room with its shadows,
history embodied in the child of a horse-drawn past
and the child of a technologically unimaginable future
together in a small apartment in a midwestern suburb,
together in the only place we ever inhabit—the present tense,
the human instant. I can still feel it, right now. It’s 2016
but I’m there with Jane and the world she summoned—
it’s 1903, it’s 1992, I’m immersed in it, like lava,
alive in the pulse of it, the gyre and genuflection of it.
What is memory but the instantiation of time within us?
What is history but a chorus of ghosts?
What is the past but that great burning, that forest of ashes,
the sound of horses running through the darkness?
This is my last communiqué from the planet of the monsters.
—ROBERTO BOLAÑO, DISTANT STAR
Walking out in the afternoon he startles at the sight
of a tortoise in the lawn and feels, instantly,
a bottomless chasm of fear opening beneath his feet.
After a moment the tortoise notices him, startles
in its own ancient and methodical manner,
and ambles behind one scraggly leaf of a fern,
craning its neck, thinking itself well hidden.
Soon, calmer, it continues its journey,
shuffling through fallen leaves like an old vagrant,
spare some change, spare some change, creeping at last
behind a red canoe that has lain unused for a decade.
Unsettled, he returns to the desk in his apartment
but cannot say whether the face in the window
is his, exactly. Or nearly. Or not at all.
What claim, then, can any image make upon him?
The smell of fresh-cut grass like the taste
of green beans eaten raw, or nearly;
cherry stems, six or seven on a cocktail napkin,
a lovely bar girl with crossed eyes
as if watching both the past and future at once.
He cannot say for certain that any word,
however intimately held, belongs to him,
so that when, in some remote mountain range
with names derived from the Arabs or Aztecs,
he hears a sudden thunder, a scimitar clash,
he finds that avalanche of phonemes as disturbing
in its nominal actuality as storm clouds.
In this way he is in dialogue with elemental beings.
He reads everything, even bits of paper
he finds blowing down the street—sometimes
he discovers they contain poems he has written
long before and surrendered to the wind.
He finds his own species fascinating and repulsive:
everything human beyond the self—
every cultural construct, every social institution—
reeks of corruption, compromise, delusion.
Utopia, were it to be conceived, would arrive
in this world stillborn, strangled with its own umbilicus.
He imagines it is possible to live one’s life contentedly,
like a reptile in the sunshine, like a blade of grass,
but he wouldn’t know anything about that, would he?
Fear and trembling at the sight of a tortoise,
fear and trembling. Still, having lived his life
in service to an illusion he feels no regret.
Poetry will save him, he thinks, with no real conviction,
turning a fresh page in his notebook
and writing there, in blue ink, the following lines.
I am trying to focus but the leaves are falling
so fast through the spectacular
gradients of light—sparrow-light, mystery-light, glory-light—
that I cannot
for all these tears and recriminations
tear my eyes away.
1. 1934: Transkei
Son of my father’s third and favorite wife,
they called me Rolihlahla,
a good name for a troublemaker,
and it was not until I began school in Qunu
that I was given an English name by the teacher,
Miss Mdingane, an admirer
of the great admiral of the colonizers.
Sports were my métier, soccer, boxing, stick-fighting,
and while I hated British imperialism
I accepted their rules
and code of honor as my own. Tall and strong,
I was descended of chieftains,
traditional advisors to the king of my people,
but it was not until my initiation ceremony,
when Chief Meligqili spoke to us
as men newly made,
that I understood the burden of that inheritance.
We are slaves in our own country,
tenants on our own soil,
with no strength, no power, no control
over our destiny in the land of our birth.
The flower of the Xhosa nation are dying
so the whites can live a life of unequaled prosperity.
2. 1964: Robben Island
Show me a world that does not belong to kings
or chieftains, then show me the ruler
who will not defend his privilege with violence.
Apartheid is not a unique injustice.
Therefore I do not take personally my persecution
and so subvert every effort to break my will.
Voiceless, I mastered the language of the law.
Underground, I learned to cast no shadow.
Imprisoned, they command me to labor,
hammering rocks in the quarry’s harsh sunlight.
Very well: the world has need of gravel
and my enemy, in his arrogance,
has placed the necessary tool in my hand.
3. 1994: Pretoria
Blood is blood. Africa is African.
Black is white is yellow is brown.
If we follow the path of vengeance
our future shall be stained as red as our past.
But forgiveness, too, is our birthright.
If you cannot see your neighbor
as your brother stand on higher ground.
Climb a hill and search these gathered faces
until you recognize in each the smile
of a favorite auntie, a father’s careworn eyes.
To see the people thus is to know
that everything must be risked on their behalf.
Freed from bondage we must feed their minds,
nourish their hearts against hatred and division.
The earth is a single homeland,
one resting place for every ancestor.
Beneath the skin we are indistinguishable.
Brown is yellow is white is black.
Africa is African. Blood is blood.
The tradition, like a poltergeist, inhabits whom it will.
That visitation, those echoings in moss-farmed wells
and dim library shelves, that bounty,
that creek-tinkle of bog music, those uncanny
squarings and crossings of borders and centuries
full of linguistic drift—that voice is poetry.
Nobody really understands how such things begin,
in which Paleolithic cavern lies its proper origin,
but when it takes up residence in cap and coat,
fit to form as lung-warm breath in the trumpet’s throat,
its feet as finely turned as shoes upon the farrier’s anvil,
and spills forth radiant as river gravel,
then let us toe the master’s lines, each and all.
And heaven help his iamb-haunted soul.
Dolly, a female Finn Dorset sheep, was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell.
like the mirror |
mirror the like |
identity is reflection |
reflection is identity |
spawn the clone |
clone the spawn |
helix as palindrome |
palindrome as helix |
Dolly and Martha |
Martha and Dolly |
aab aab |
baa! baa! |
Jobs v. Gates: The Mind-Body Debate (1997)
Steve Jobs for the Body
once Henry Ford built cars to carry people
as computers now convey
the unstoppable binary flux of information
in a machine which must remain functional
and might as well be beautiful
Bill Gates for the Mind
data is not a garden snail
it does not need a plastic shell
machines are nothing
but mechanical toys for distractible children
what matters is the system
Jobs for the Body
we ourselves are machines of bone and meat
the body is our only home
systems crash but we endure
power corrupts the mighty fall and the weak
shall inherit the market
Gates for the Mind
the program is mightier than the sword
as a species we are defined by brainpower
our flaws are etched in the source code
of our DNA and the body
is a poorly engineered commodity
Jobs
the body is erotic and sensual
full of hard drives and swooping curves
the world of appetite echoes in its carnal well
I pity those too irretrievably geeky
to appreciate the body’s glory
Gates
consciousness is sexy
because consciousness sells
you have no products and your company is bankrupt
open the Window and smell the roses
Stevie boy
Steve
nice glasses dork
Bill
I am the richest man in the world
Steve
soon we will destroy you
Bill
’s like attacking the ocean
with water balloons
Steve
soon we will destroy you
with multicolored portable music players
Bill
oh for heaven’s sake. . . .
Steve
attack, attack!
destroy, destroy!
(The debate breaks down.)
Searching for the word for Bob Dylan tonight—ornery, prophetic, magisterial—old muleskin and buckshot Bob, bindle-stiff Bob in glad rags and bolo tie,
sorcerer Bob, straw-into-gold Bob, twinned king and harlequin, prince and Rumpelstiltskin, half rattlesnake, half Rumi,
boozy Bob, maudlin and woozy Bob, Big-Bill-Broonzy Bob, boogie-woogie Bob, zoot suit Bob, shambolic Bob,
aura of the bird of paradise as written by some Old Testament seer, Jeremiah stoned in the wings, vale of sorrows in a hollow-body guitar,
wrought-iron Bob graven in cold steel, deep-dyed, jailhouse tattooed, inked in peacock plumage, and now the Texas swing, jump blues,
transcending all genres, embodying all hues—reverent, prismatic, elemental—imperious as the color black, off-white, indigo and dandelion,
wail and twine of the high and lonely continental slide, cool and celebratory Bob with wide lapels and smiles all around,
bardic Bob, Sephardic Bob, seraph-with-a-flaming-sword Bob—gravid, telluric, enrapt—stained-glass Bob gigging with ghosts,
glad-handing brass monkeys, line dancing into the land of gardenia and honeysuckle perfume, and it helps to be a river,
helps to be a summer night in old Quebec on the banks of the fleuve Saint-Laurent beneath a sarabande of stars,
helps to believe in the rock of the continent, l’Amérique profonde, helps to be polyphonic, Francophone, feedback like a dial tone,
helps it is the first concert we have taken our kids to see and Jackson so little he falls asleep in his mother’s lap
but still an encounter with the continuum, the tradition, root cellar of the lexicon, unrefined ore of the demotic,
voice like quarried granite, voice like cigarette burns in the carpet of a roadside motel in the Iron Range of Minnesota,
voice like a temple bell tolling, rolling, groove-worn register to which it cleaves like a bowling ball to warped lumber,
organ riffs and slide guitar, grace notes, fables of closure—luminous, cobalt, antediluvian—canonical Bob bearing our burdens,
blood-and-guts Bob, floodwater Bob in the Mississippi Delta washing our troubles away, taking us down, bringing it all back home.
Pentatina for Five Artists (1999)
Art is memory.
Art is ego.
Art is money.
Art is fire.
Art is ashes.
Ashes are time’s war paint.
Memory is the history of an individual mind.
Fire is a genius of transformation.
Ego is the seed of identity.
Money is pure sex.
Sex is a socially constructed narrative, or just sex.
War paint is to the self as Easter dye to eggs.
Identity is our floodwall against a sea of others.
The mind is a sponge, or a spiderweb, or a web aggregator.
Transformation composes an erasure poem of the past.
The past is a cultural forest, and also a forest fire.
Sex is money, baby, and money is also money.
Web aggregator, entelechial spider-mind of memory!
Egg of dust, o loneliness, o bride of ashes.
Others; othernesses; other as self: the Other is ego.
Ego is the art of Cindy Sherman.
Fire is the art of Cai Guo-Qiang
Ashes are the art of Anselm Kiefer.
Money is the art of Jeff Koons.
Memory is the art of Louise Bourgeois.
Century of wraiths & indeterminacy.
Century of silicon, century of oil & isotopic dust,
century of honey & plutonium, o radiant century,
o eager, anguished, totalitarian century!
Eagle-taloned century, crumb-tongued century,
abandoned empires, Colony Collapse Disorder:
the bees are dying & with them all our metaphors.
Civilizations are born in the dawn of ideas.
Culture endures as habit, folklore, the Lares,
household gods haunting familiar ruins.
Ideas possess histories not as boats create wakes
but as clouds cast numinous shadows upon the earth,
as archetypes possess resonance, seashells volume,
words both origins & ascensions—language
as baker’s yeast, as nectar to the hive, as honeycomb,
as organism, a culture nourished & grown,
hence: cultivation: cultivar, rice or wheat or taro,
yeastless cakes cooked hurriedly on flat stones
in the embers as the tribe moves on,
before dawn, in search of—in search of what?
Food, safety, home? The idea of home?
The idea of the idea, pure haven of meaning?
What can it mean, in a century of fire,
to sound that long Odyssean moan—home—
widemouthed orison of birth & origin,
cave-mouth of the future, well-mouth of the past?
Century of devastation, century of loss, like all the others.
Chronos raises his hammer, a bronze bell chimes.
When, during the Great Leap Forward,
as millions perished in famines of his making,
Chairman Mao contemplated replacing the name
of every Chinese citizen with a number,
the vast authoritarian machinery of the twentieth century
reached its numbing & inevitable apogee.
And when he shied from that stroke, the mute
apparatus of history ground forward unperturbed.
Dust will consume us, the ruins of our cities
become salt & ash, & still the brave astronauts
who plant a flag in the iron dirt of Mars
will bear the human burden of oxygen & names.